THE STATE of Rhode Island faces a multitude of problems relating to revenue and spending — particularly acute within the Department of Corrections (DOC). Over the past 10 years, the DOC has had dramatic increases in both the number of individuals under its control and its annual expenditures. In that time the population at the Adult Correctional Institutions has grown from 3,240 to 3,771 inmates, individuals supervised by probation and parole have increased from 20,583 to 27,340, and the budget has swollen from $116 million to $162 million.

How can our state leaders develop a cost-effective, safe correctional policy while decreasing the DOC’s general fund appropriation? We would suggest looking at five impact areas: pre-trial, bail, parole, technical violations and closure of the Price Medium Security Facility.

The prison population can be reduced through the diversion of prison-bound offenders. Recidivism rates can be lowered by providing judges and probation officers with credible, cost-effective programs that won’t jeopardize public safety, but will assist the offender in successfully reintegrating into the community. The creation of an Office of Community Alternatives would offer viable budgetary options to the state.

OCA should encompass the DOC community-confinement unit and the court bail unit. Also, OCA should include contracted services, such as day reporting centers, restitution and community service, GPS monitoring, substance-abuse treatment, and employment and education services. To succeed, we need to shift from normalizing the offender’s environment to normalizing the individual. There are now complete bodies of scientific work confirming that a large percentage of the inmate population is disabled in multiple ways. So it is essential that a Division of Legal Medicine be established within the OCA to evaluate the physical and psychological needs of the offender that becomes the cornerstone of every individual treatment/release plan.

In 1990 Connecticut had no income tax, its sales tax generated insufficient revenue to maintain state institutions, state employees were being laid off, and inmates were being released prematurely. The executive, legislative and judicial branches stepped forward with bold, decisive action to create the Office of Alternative Sanctions, empowering the judiciary to divert offenders directly to intermediate sanctions, which has now resulted in the elimination of overcrowding, the realization of significant cost savings and preservation of public safety.

At any given time, the ACI detains about 800 offenders awaiting trial. Many fail to post bail yet pose a marginal risk of flight while some remain incarcerated based solely upon their housing status. Pre-trial screening, despite the efforts of the District Court, is vastly underused. The bail unit would benefit by unifying bail criteria, increasing the depth and number of interviews, establish a pre-trial release program and coordinate temporary housing for homeless or transient defendants.

Since lowering the pre-trial population is not enough because the offender generally lacks the skills necessary to change behavior, a front-end alternative must be available. We recommend establishing Day Reporting Centers in each county, responsible for screening and referring low-risk defendants to appropriate social services. Each DRC should house a medical and psychiatric professional, probation counselor and a public defender. The individual treatment/release plan recommendation, compiled by the probation officer, including the mental-health and physical evaluation and presented to the court by the public defender, becomes the basis for the sentence imposed by the trial judge. Sentencing may involve more conditions such as restitution services, counseling and treatment, community service, transitional housing and GPS tracking.

To create an environment fully using alternative sanctions, we recommend creating status-review teams, meeting monthly and located within each court building, comprised of judges, prosecutors, public defenders, bail unit employees, probation officers and DRC project case managers.

On average, 235 detainees at the ACI are held daily for either failure to attain cash bail or inability to secure the surety bail requirement for release. Of these, a majority is held on a bail amount of $10,000 or less. Although the DOC is unable to provide the exact figure, it is purported that about 50 percent of the detainees are held on a bail amount of $1,000 — an expenditure of $100, about the cost to hold one inmate daily at the ACI. Failure to attain bail from any source may be rectified through a re-interview process. These detainees are not considered at high risk of flight or re-offense. We recommend that the bail unit be expanded, resulting in more thorough background checks and subsequent interviews with the detainees.

An often-overlooked variable in population planning at the ACI is the uncertainty of parole dates. Our recommendation is for the parole board to implement a Mutual Agreement Programming (MAP) system and make release decisions earlier in the sentence. The parole board currently incorporates severity of the offense, criminal history and age as standard factors when determining release, positioning the board to make decisions shortly after sentencing. By incorporating MAP into the release formula the board and the inmate can modify or rescind the release date and conditions based upon his or her institutional behavior and pre-agreed conditions for release.

In 2007 there were 1,241 technical probation violators housed at the ACI, with an average stay of 22 days. Parole technical violations provided an additional 129 inmates. Over 60 percent of these violations were for crimes of less severity than the controlling sanction — about 15 percent were for motor-vehicle violations. We recommend that the DOC allow a probation officer the flexibility to increase or decrease an offender’s community-release status. At the daily rate of $108 per inmate, removing motor-vehicle technical violators from the ACI would generate savings approximating $488,268 per year.

Finally, the Price Medium Security Building has a rated capacity of 284 inmates and an operational capacity of 324 inmates. The facility’s annual per inmate cost in 2007 totaled $45,282. Implementing our recommendations, the ACI population would be reduced by more than the operational capacity of the Price building, thus letting the DOC reclassify its existing population and close the one facility that is located off the state-owned Howard complex – making this valuable piece of real estate available for purchase.

The cost associated with the development, planning and operating an OCA that includes all the support services mentioned could reach as high as $15 million to $20 million. To support this service-delivery model, we recommend the state reallocate $5.8 million of the savings incurred through closing the Price Medium Security Facility and transferring an additional $12.7 million from the DOC community confinement unit to OCA. These policy-change recommendations could save the state about $11.9 million in prison operational cost in the first year alone. Further, we could reasonably expect to save, through an OCA delivery model, as much as $105 million in future capital expenditures as well as about $19 million in annual operating expenses associated with new facilities if we continue upon the path of arrest, incarcerate, build.

Jonathan Houston is executive director of Justice Assistance, a nonprofit organization.